I would like to be able to see how one individual is related to another individual. In other words, I would enter both names and the program would tell me exactly how they are related. For example, "John Smith and Jane Jones are first cousins once removed." The program currently allows only a list of all relationships, which is extremely difficult to wade through.
You can do this in FTB by clicking Person in toolbar then 'relation'. I don't know if this is possible if you only have an on-line tree. PS--I just tried it on-line and it works. Go to your family tree and then Reports.
AHA! It worked when I did the "Person-Relation" selection. The only thing I get in the "report" section is the HUGE list, which I don't want. Thank you for this tip! Guess I need to play around with the program a little more...
I see a lot of smart matches in trees that say people are alive when they can't possibly be. I accidently had my close family as being dead, which I corrected when I found it. Just easier for people who have large trees to find a mistake like that.
It would be nice to have a middle name field. Geni.com has that field. They allow searches by middle name also which helps narrow down your search.
I would also like a AKA (As Known As) or "Display Name" field. It would default to how MyHeritage.com currently shows names. However, when people have names "first, middle, family, nickname", different people would like their name displayed differently like:
With a family tree whose branches cross alot........I would find it helpful to put a notation somewhere that tells me this person is already in my tree, on another branch.
IE: Paternal cousin Mary married maternal cousin Ed.
Or maternal great granfathers sister married paternal great grandmothers cousin.
I though perhaps a litlle star in the upper left corner would be a good signal of "this person appears elsewhere in your tree"
That happened to me a lot. Fortunately most of the time I was able to remember when I already had someone on my tree when their name came up again, so I could just use the connect function. Sometimes I then still had duplicates that I had to remove manually. Now each person who shows up in the tree several ways now has a symbol on the bottom where I can view the other line.
I was assuming you were talking about the online version, so if you are using FTB this may not apply. If you click the Add sign on the left part of a person's pink/blue card there is an option to connect to an existing person.
It does this in the on-line tree MODERN VIEW. If you use FTB you have the option to merge these people with the attach/detach function, but this is tricky and you have to be careful. I don't know if this can be done if you have an on-line tree only.
As a trained user, there are more things in the layout there seems illogical. You create a person, what data is relevant to look at, in the left menu, add data. Too many clicks, to many different pages, is a bad idea. All data for each person in the family tree, must to be displayed in the left menu. Profile menu, is in my opinion, only for current information on living persons and lifecycle descriptions of dead people. Add Data menu is the actual data, and this is where you look when you want to compare data and quickly see the source references, etc. I'm sure everyone in the world, regardless of religion, political or other conditions, genealogist of the essential data.On the online version you must dial “year mdr.dato” It appears as “md.dato.år”. It is illogical. I add data to a box labeled notes, when I type in this box it appears at the top, although it is at the bottom of the add data. It is illogical and disturbing reading. There where you inscribe data, it most appears in the layout. Alternatively, it might could have a fewer add data, but with the option for individual users to change the text on the online version. That way each user can use the title you want. I've made a list with the most common data titles in Danish and attach the file as an example of meIt is my hope that the layout will be simpler without the incomparable clicks and too many places you should check data.Best wishes from a happy genealogist.Elsebeth Vienberg
I've had at least four people I invited to my site say they tried to see the family tree, but all they could see was themselves and their parents. Clearly it wasn't intuitive to them - as it was for me - that clicking the blue and pink boxes above their parents will take them to their parents. And these were people from all different ages. Perhaps they need a popup balloon tip indicating that they need to click there to see the rest of the tree. Or maybe simply having the 'steps' zoom initially set to 3 instead of 1, gives them large enough a picture for them to see the pattern more clearly.
Why dont you change your welcome message to new members to include a brief introduction in how to navigate. As it is today your member will get a pop-up balloon (Click to view the family branch of ...) when holding the mouse over the boxes.
I have invited several relatives and have never hadsimilar problems
I am trying out the product, and the first thing I wanted to do was move around the tree view. I find the programmed technique described above to be completely awkward and counterintuitive. This is a modern computer for crying out loud. Why not use the Ancestry method of left-click in a bare area and drag it wherever you want? Surely this is not a technique that is patentable by Ancestor!
I am evaluating both, and both have their advantages, but the most basic and probable first thing a user wants to do is get to a different tree area. So far MyHeritage fails at this to the important point and I will probably purchase the Ancestry program.
I would like to point out that we are constantly trying to improve the way the user interacts with the system, some are indeed counter intuitive, however, they could save valuable time in very large family trees. Loading time is a variable here as-well, and we still didn't figure out the best way to view the family tree (neither did Ancestry) and so we continuously trying to improve our service and you should see new and exciting updates in the near future.
Please, let me know if you have any additional suggestions, we're always glad to hear feedback!
